Doomed to Fail - Ep 137 - Birds of a Feather, Stolen Together: Edwin Rist

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

If you haven't heard this story, don't google it! You'll never guess where it's going and the ride, the ride is wild! Edwin Rist loved tying fishing flies, a fun craft where you have the potential to stab yourself in the finger at every turn! He just had hit the peak of his work and needed something new, something snazzy, potentially extinct. Enter the Natural History Museum at Tring - and we'll take it from there!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do. Hey, Taylor. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. Do you like my radio voice, how I started out when we were talking without me recording? And I was just all like gloomy or dull. And now I'm just super radio-y. I can totally tell. Doing a great job.

Thank you. Thank you. how's your weekend been? Good. We did, well, I bought a giant, I have this idea in my front yard to, like, put bird cages around and fill them with rocks. And then I found one on Facebook marketplace that's like huge. It's like over six feet tall. And my husband very graciously drove like a half hour to go get it and dug like a flat spot in the front yard for it to be. And we're going to start filling it with rocks.

And it's cool. So I'm excited. Is it meant to be decorative? Yeah. Okay. Sweet. When you're done, send a picture. I'd love to see what it looks like.

I will. I'm getting into the Halloween season. So, yeah, I went and bought some pumpkin candles today. Oh. So it's been. Shaped or flavored? Flavored, scented. I didn't eat them.

You know what I mean. But I'm just, you know, finally getting in the spirit of the season, which is Nice. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, Target is chock full with Halloween decorations already, which is great. So yeah, because it's season. Yeah, I'm ready. I think we'll start soon. I'm going to Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando. Yeah. I mean, cool. You should come when we did that. Did it? Wait, we didn't do an Orlando. I did in Orlando. I did in Orlando when I was living in Orlando. We went to Anaheim. That's what it was. Yeah. Yep. Yep. No, I don't think it's in Anaheim. I think it's. It's in Hollywood, whatever, who cares? Yeah, you're right, it is Hollywood. Yep, yeah. I'm mixing up California Adventures with the other one. Cool, though.

That sounds fun. Yeah. Sweet. Okay, you want to dive in? Yeah, well, let me introduce us. Oh, yeah. Hello, welcome to doomed to fail. We are the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week.

And I am Taylor, joined by Fars, who's going to Halloween Horror Nights in our end. thank you I get why you fired me from in the intro because even now I forget to let you do it no problems am I going first today

I think so yeah okay this one's gonna be a little short one too but I don't know I don't know if folks feel about the short ones but let us know if they suck but this one I mean this is

it's a great story it's just there wasn't that much to it so but yeah we'll go ahead and dive in and this one is going to be a pretty bizarre case involving fly fishing museums and theft yeah so I learned a lot about fly fishing that'll come in handy I'm trying to humble brag here so let's get into the museum part of the

story so we're going to be talking about the natural history museum at Tring which is in the UK it is now part of the natural history museum of London but it originally was started by getting Walter Rothschild part of the Rothschild family, which like really, like I could do a whole episode. There's so much stuff there. I went like tiny bit into it. It was just kind of blown away. They were crazy rich. Like finance people, banker people. Apparently they were worth like $350 billion at the time, which is like insane. Yeah. So anyways, this guy, Walter was born into this insanely wealthy family. And he basically, as he became an adult, had to enter the banking industry despite having

no interest at all. But it was a family business. So he had to do it. What he really cared about was zoology and just love collecting bugs and animals. That's really what he cared about. What year was this? So the next line was in 1892. That's exactly when like

he just reminds me of it's very Teddy Roosevelt's of him. Yes. Yes. He reminded me very much of Teddy Roosevelt as I was reading this. Yeah. So in 1892 he was 24 years old and he opened a private museum to house his ever increasing collection of zoological effects.

it would go ahead sorry I'm gonna move my hands see if I can make Zoom do a thing I love that yeah that's what you should do with your money see like I think the Hearst guy did that except he did it after he was a billionaire right like he turned his house into a zoo

but it was like way after the fact but he would his collection would grow to house tens of thousands of specimen including a very influential collection of birds by a man named Alfred Russell Wall I learned so much for this.

This is like the funnest why I had research. I learned so much. I'm really excited. I feel like you learned a time. I'm excited. So I'm going to segue real quick into like why this collection was so important

and who this guy was. So Alfred Wallace was a biologist who traveled the world collecting animals to study. In I wrote, no, it's yeah, it's definitely 1859. It's not 1959. So in 1959,

he was the very first person to publish his theory on natural selection. evolution what was his name again Alfred Wallace I feel like I've heard about him and I think I talked about him and talked about Darwin Starwin like took it from him so that's not true that's not true we can't besmirch Darwin on this but there's a story behind it and I was like blown away as I was reading this so Darwin like you said he gets credit for discovering natural selection but he published his book on the origin of species a year after 1815

And that's mostly why people think that he gets the credit for, but it's actually not. These two were independently researching things. They weren't aware of each other's studies. Darwin had started writing about this since 1830, so two decades earlier. But he was just terrified of publishing his research because he thought that like the religious class were just like beating death. And so he didn't have the courage really to publish his findings until Alfred Wallace published. his findings and he was like okay I should talk about this too because now

it's already out there so that's what happened so the animals that helped Wallace reached his conclusion were mostly insects and birds birds in particular seem to be kind of the north star for animals to figure out natural selection aspects like for example Darwin's famous for his galapagos finches

and they're like a huge part of how he developed his theory on evolution So because Wallace's collection was of extreme scientific value, it was given that his collection would be handed over to a natural history history museum after his passing for further study and for the public to be able to see it. So part of the collection that he handed off, I had to look these birds up because I don't know what they were. So the type of birds included the superb bird of paradise. the better than another bird of paradise apparently so okay the flower the bird of paradise flower looks like this thing that's why we call it a bird of paradise

flower you're looking at you're looking at the bird right now I don't think that looks like it's like it's the coloring is up with like the pointiness of it the way like dives and all that like they're supposed to mimic the bird of paradise I guess all right he also had what's called a resplendent Quetzal

Q-U-E-T-Z-A-L and the magnificent rifle bird I can't know which one was which one of these was like crazy beautiful one was like this turquely sharp like green with like a bright red breast

like it was gorgeous it looked like it had this cutest little fro it had like this like one fro kind of on it it was really cool looking what's a quetzel what does quetzel mean I don't know

Because the quetzel coattlis is a dinosaur. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah. There was a flying dinosaur called the quetzel at some point, too, right? Oh, were you going to tell me that? No, no, but when you brought it up, I was like, oh, yeah, that's why I've seen that name before. I'm a mom, so I know a lot about dinosaurs. Yeah, that's great. And you're a Jurassic Park fan, hopefully.

Yeah, of course. So from here, so that's the collection that was kind of in this museum. And, like, that's how it all kind of accumulated. I'm sure there's, like, a lot more to it than that. But they're very, it's a very important collection that this museum was holding on to. From here, I'm going to pivot to fly tying. I honestly don't know where this is going. I know.

I'm very excited. Is it awesome? Usually when you're talking, I'm also making like the episode like page, like the image, but I don't even know what to put on it. So I'm not going to Google. I'm not going to just, you keep going to be going. It's going to be fun. I got to give a shout out to Rachel.

She's the one who suggested this. I would never have found this on my own. Amazing. So, okay, we're going to pivot. it to the totally unrelated topic of fly tying. So fly tying is the practice of creating lures for fly fishing. The basic design of a fly tie lure is a hook, the threat connecting the lure to the fishing pole, beads to kind of mimic the head of an insect, and feathers. So it's kind of piecing together a little bit here. So the idea is you cast the fly over water

to imitate the behavior of flying insect to bait a fish and to take in the lure. That's basically it from what I've gathered fly fishing is considered like significantly harder than regular fishing and it's like it requires a ton of preparation a ton of custom equipment and a lot of skill it seems very multifaceted and complex is it because you have to stand in the water do you stand in the water that's the one where you stand in the water yeah and actually so one of my favorite like clothing places it's a place called orvis i don't know if anybody else has them but they're here in texas they're not big they're like semi known and And I just like them because they're clothes, like just lasts a lifetime.

Like, whatever you buy there, you will, if you don't outgrow it size-wise, you'll own it for the rest of your life. And they are huge with fly fishermen. Like, one whole section of the store, I just like walk around looking at their lures. It's really fun. I mean, I couldn't get into it because, like, it seems like a really expensive hobby. But it does seem fun. Yeah. So like anything that is complex and multifaceted, it kind of has some culture.

and it has some subculture which includes people who just create or collect the flies themselves and like people who like don't fly fish I eat like they literally just create these things or or buy them. It seems like a fun

craft. It's a craft. It's literally a craft. Yeah, that's what it's a craft for like older men. That's basically it. It's like doily making for men basically. So and like frankly I mean I don't know like if you look at some of them. some are like a really really pretty and some of them are really really nice they're meant to be very specific to the type of fish you want to catch the season in which you want to catch the fish

like there's a whole weird science behind it it yeah it sounded a lot like collecting like collectible baseball or Pokemon cards you know like you get a real nerd about this stuff to really know what it is and um yeah people who are into it just they just want the rarest and most valuable flies, even if they don't end up using them. So with that context, let's get to the main character or story who's going to kind of piece all this stuff together for us, a guy named Edwin Rist. So Edwin was born in 1989 in New York, and he was autistic, he was homeschooled, and he was very fixated on two things early on in his childhood.

one was playing the flute he was an exceptional flute player the other was fly tying he never went fly fishing he just was really into fly tying specifically yeah specifically he was into Victorian fly tying

which is a unique distinction because this is like the most expensive end of the hobby like this is not what you don't walk into Orvis and find Victorian fly ties there like these are those are massive produce things. This is like the Rolls Royce

of like fly tying essentially. He got really good at this. So his parents actually helped him get deeper into this because they would take him to conferences. He would go to conventions. He would compete in flytying competitions and win them. He was really, really good at this essentially. Ultimately, as he turned into a young adult, he was accepted to the London's Royal Academy of Music

to study music, study flute, and keep going in that direction with his interests. So he goes off to London, and he discovered the museum we started with in Tring. And he learned of the extensive collection of rare birds and decided to write them a letter under a pseudonym saying that he is a ornithological researcher. Yes. Thank you, Taylor. Yep. A bird.

A bird. A bird guy. Yes. A bird guy. And he wanted special acts. to specimen that were within the museum and some way somehow this access was granted so edwin goes down to the museum and he gets access to parts of the museum that other people don't get to see he gets to see where some of the rare stuff is kept because not i mean the you're trying intends

it's all out on display right there's a whole back of backup house and he also gets a sense of where those are kept as well as what the security looks like so he's basically just casing this place like It's a bank in like a heist movie, essentially. A few months passes and under the cover of darkness and having memorized his diagram of the interior of this thing, he went back to the museum and used a glass cutter to cut open the glass and enter the museum when it was dark when it was nighttime. Nobody was there. He would go about stealing about 300 rare bird species, some extinct, some extremely endangered. Not fun. It took about, go ahead.

I'm like a bunch of stupid questions. Did he need the entire bird? No. So he wanted the bird's skin to pluck the bird feather off of. So most stories that you read about him are that he stole a ton of bird skins because it contained the feather. But the Alfred Wallace collection was complete. birds that were stuff and so yes you would have to take the whole

bird in that case yeah fun stuff I never I guess no that no no I had a gross point I'm not going to bring it up very mature so it took about a month before anybody realized that these things were missing

because like I said they weren't displayed birds they were just on the back they were there for research purposes and and again a lot of these birds were extinct or super endangered or semi-endangered these were, I read a lot of disparate takes on this because some people were like, who cares? These things have not existed in the world for 150 years, whatever, like, we can move on from this. But then a lot of researchers would show up and say, no, like, this proves

all the evolutionary stuff that Alfred Wallis put forth because this thing went extinct. And now the bird in this region has adapted. So now we're able to read the clues of the environment on how the adaptations are moving. Like, it's actually super it's important. Yeah. Like there was something, I came to the exact story.

It was something about how we learned that deep was poisonous because of a comparison of the tring bird collection to local birds within that environment. I forgot exactly what the story of the background was, but like it actually is consequential. Totally. So police rightly realized that the only person who would get value out of these birds

would be some insane bird collector. who's also a cat burglar or the more logical answer a fly tire why would they go to that right away why would you steal bird skin I don't know but it's weird

I don't love the term birdskin and I guess it's like Buffalo Bill I mean I don't know it just feels like I guess that'd be the next person if you needed them

well so what's interesting is I was in this point of the story I hadn't figured out what was actually what the end and this conclusion end of the story but at this point of the story I was just like dying to know how much these damn things worth and so I started Googling like I just about a question I have yeah wait hold on yeah good I was sorry I just like talked over you um remember in like a long time ago like a lot of birds of Florida would extinct because they're using them for hats like there's feathers and hats. I'm sure.

But I don't know that, but I'm sure. This isn't a, I guess that would be the only other person I could think needed feathers. Yeah, if you want a hat in your feather, call it macaroni. But what I was trying to figure out was how much of these damn things even worth, like, you know. And so I started Googling around. And like the first hit I got when I googled some variation of term of fly, tie, rare, fishing. you know, price was flyfishing.co.uk, which is a forum. And folks there were talking about these things going for around 1,500 or so per. I mean, that's for like the very rare ones,

but most of them were in like the hundreds of dollars. Like it's not inconsequential. I mean, you're using one or two feathers per bird. You're probably getting like tens of thousands of feathers per bird. I mean, it could add up some real money. Yes, that's fair. So that. That's, What I ended up doing there is how this story ends because the police literally did the exact same thing I did because they went to the fly fishing forums and we're trying to find people who were trying to sell flies on the forums from the type of birds that were stolen because again nobody had these birds. Like there's only one guy in the world who had these birds was this guy. That was it. 15 months after the heist, police tracked Edwin's activities on the forum and arrested him at his apartment in London. I love how the story discusses this

where they're based like, yeah, he immediately confessed on a spot because surrounding him in the apartment was incredibly rare birds and bird feathers. These are mine. I've always had this. They're bar mitz for gifts. My mom gave them to me. So ridiculous.

So he got a unique case of privileged justice because he was found guilty, obviously of burglary. But his lawyer also argued that he had severe Asperger syndrome, which seems true. I mean, I can't. It doesn't sound like he doesn't have Asperger's.

And so because of that, he was spared prison time. It was just time served and he got to go home. He said that he used the money he made from selling his feathers and lures to purchase a new flute. That's his argument why he did it. That's the motivation for why he did it. So how much? many went back or that he did he destroy all hundreds were missing hundreds were missing so like again he had a lot of feathers to play with out of 300 birds i think it was like a hundred and

17 somewhere around there actually went back and the rest are we don't know we don't know where they are either made them in the lures or not um i kind of like there's a chance that someone at the museum was like good i don't need all these drawers of like 100 year old bird skins i would have had to next week i was supposed to categorize them now i don't fucking have to you should never work in a museum taylor i have worked in a museum but but i feel like i would be like oh if you don't have a catalog that because all you do we're at your museum is catalog things it's true um so so the the good thing the reason why he took these birds specifically was because they were categorized because they were all labeled and he knew that these were the rarest lures that you could

possibly make this Victorian-era version of like fly-taying. Do they know who bought them? We don't know who bought them. No. No, they didn't weren't that far. It seems like this is like a hobby of super wealthy older white men and I don't feel like they generally get prosecuted

of the regular rate like everybody else does. And so I think that I think this was like a Prince Andrews situation. Like let's not ask any more questions because we don't want to know anything else. But he would eventually graduate from university. He would move to Germany

where he assumed the name Edwin Reinhard and continued on his musical career. He has a YouTube channel which is called at Heavy Metal Flute where he recreates songs and soundtracks on his flute

and it's actually pretty fun. He does, he does Master of Puppets on the flute. He does Lord of the Rings on the flute. He does like the, oh God, what's the other one? Dame of Thrones on the flute. He does a lot of fun flute stuff.

he hasn't posted in like six years though so like who knows what's going on with him i tried finding him and i just his name's not so unique that you wouldn't find a thousand of these guys so i didn't get too well with it but that's him that's the feather thief um edwin wrist slash now edwin reinhard and uh he really pulled together a lot of disparate topics that i did not think would ever come into a single outline yeah no i didn't know where that was going to go i think it's funny that he changed his name, but everybody knows what his name is. Like that. Okay. It doesn't make sense. But also he's just like trying

so hard to be German at this point, Reinhard. It's like, come on. It's like Rhineland. Yeah. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? Yeah, super fun. Because somebody got hurt, really. I mean, yes, invaluable research was destroyed, but nobody was physically hurt. Yeah. No one was hurt.

Kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. Probably stole one of your pigeons that went extinct forever ago. Miles and I have been talking about passenger pigeons. He's very worried about them. We have a book to show you. Wait, pause.

I had to go under Miles's bed to find this. But this is a cute book that we read a lot called Dodo's Are Not Extinct. And it's about Dodoes who pretend to be other animals. It's like wearing a chican beak. So cute. And then like it says that like the Tasmanian tiger. Like they wore these There's like

These guys that were like half horse Half zebra and they're like Oh they just wear striped pants Like you just can't tell they're there But at the end of it It does have a pretty comprehensive list of Well I don't know It has a list of

Examples of animals that have gone extinct And I've been thinking of researching some of these as well And the past two of pages on there Which is why I brought this up Very cute Walter Rothschild Was obsessed with zebras and he would crossbreed them with all kinds of different things.

I did just see a picture of him with a carriages. Yeah. Yeah. So he actually rode one of those into like the Queen's court or something, like to prove that you could domesticate a zebra. Love it. I'm like wondering like how badly did you beat those zebras to like a whole carriage? Yeah, I don't know how you don't think domesticating a wild animal is. easy.

Also, Taylor, there's a movie that William Defoe is in about a hunter who is seeking out a Tasmanian what you got, I forgot the name of them, Tiger, yeah. That's cool. Yeah, it's really fun. It's a really fun movie. It's kind of scary, but like, in a fun way.

They went extinct in 1936. Yeah, some people think they're not extinct. That's what the whole promise of the movie is. Yeah. Well, the last Tasmanian Tiger was, named Benjamin you died in captivity. Or baby.

So, wait, that's my story. Do you have any tales from listeners? Morgan told me that she thought that she had appendicitis and the thing that they had her do was jump and she said that she couldn't jump and they were like, oh no. And that was like a sign.

I'm just glad to know that it's actually really painful because at least you'll know. You would know. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the thing. So. Yeah, but if you have any thing, like us to cover any cool ideas, like this was such a cool, like random one that I'd never heard of,

let us know. We're at doomed to fell pod at gmail.com and then doomed to fill pot at all of the socials. There's so many of those. There's so many weird stories. It's such a shame that like so much history is just like not known. I mean, you can know it, but you got to like not have a job and you can not just like go around. I'm trying to discover stuff, which I guess ultimately is going to be our goal with me in a cave and you in underground subterranean tunnels. But still, let us, let us research this, please.

I was just imagining me and you with walkie-talkies for no reason. And, like, I'm inside the Paris catacombs and you're, like, in a cave. And I'm like, can you hear me? Like, if we didn't talk while we were doing it, there'd be no reason to, but still. It's like a funer version of Indiana Jones. Yeah. Love it. Cool.

Well, thank you. That's fun. Yeah. That's my story. anything you want to lead out with? Nope. Oh, if you haven't already, let's just give us some stars on Apple podcast.

We have like two one stars and like, who knows why, you know, that's annoying. So. Yeah, and if you gave us one star, like, what is wrong with you? Why are you still listening? Like, give a sad life. What is your problem?

Yeah, what is your problem? I don't know. You're a podcast, one star person. We'll find you. We'll put you in the catacomb. Okay, that's super. Too far, too far. Yeah, subscribe to Dumafell Pot at gmail.

Or write to us at Dumafell Pot.com. Subscribe on Dudafelon, on YouTube, the socials, all the good things. And we'll join you again in a few days. Sweet. Thanks, Taylor.